June 18, 2009

Alone with a drowned passenger's shivering child.
Darling, this is only a game! How marvelous were my fancied adventures as I sat
on a hard park bench pretending to be immersed in a trembling book. Around the
quiet scholar, nymphets played freely, as if he were a familiar statue or part
of an old tree's shadow and sheen. Once a perfect little beauty in a tartan
frock, with a clatter put her heavily armed foot near me upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into me and righten
the strap of her roller skate, and I dissolved in the sun, with my book for fig
leaf, as her auburn ringlets fell all over her skinned knee, and the shadow of
leaves I shared pulsated and melted on her radiant limb next to my chameleonic cheek. Another time a red-haired school girl hung over
me in the metro, and a revelation of axillary russet I obtained remained in my
blood for weeks. I could list a great number of these one-sided diminutive
romances. Some of them ended in a rich flavor of hell. It happened for instance
that from my balcony I would notice a lighted window across the street and what
looked like a nymphet in the act of undressing before a co-operative mirror.
Thus isolated, thus removed, thevision acquired an especially keen charm that made me race with all speed toward
my lone gratification. But abruptly, fiendishly, the tender pattern of nudity I
had adored would be transformed into the disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of a man
in his underclothes reading his paper by the open window in the hot, damp,
hopeless summer night.Nabokov

March 02, 2006

Word from Pettirosso, the coffeeshop across the street, is that a woman came in yesterday and tore the covers off all their copies of this week’s Stranger because the cover image “offends her feminist sensibilities.”